"there are immaturities, but there are immensities"- from Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake

Saturday, January 27, 2018

"the spark inside" - me and others on Mark E. Smith and The Fall

my first Fall record

Below is all my writing on The Fall (well, nearly all of it) in chronological order of the releases, rather than the order in which they were written.

There is also a links list to my favorite pieces of writing on The Fall by other people, mostly from the early days of the group, including Barney Hoskyns's 1981 interview and K-punk's trilogy of essays.And there is an interview transcript with Martin Bramah on his time in The Fall and the young M.E.S. Oh and there's also a couple of choice snippets of M.E.S. on M.E.S. the Fall's most perfect record Out of my own writing, the missing bit here is the only time I actually interviewed Mark E. - a piece that was part of a whimsical Observer package feature about how people with the name Smith were spending Christmas! Had a look for it but it must be languishing with the hefty chunk of the Reynolds archive that's in storage (couldn't face bringing all that paper - there's so much of it - with us to LA when we moved - a decision subsequently regretted on a monthly basis). This phone interview with M.E.S. would have been 1989 probably. There wasn't a a huge story there to be honest - Mark was spending it with his mum and he was looking forward to being pampered and doted upon by various elderly female relatives. As others have reported, despite his reputation, Mark was unexpectedly pleasant. Indeed at one point, when I brought up the subject of his image as a surly, doesn't-suffer-fools-gladly curmudgeon, he said "I'll have you know, Simon, I'm actually a very pleasant man."

The Fall's greatest record

Oh, the other missing bit of course is Rip It Up and Start Again's Manchester chapter "Just Step Sideways" which is largely about The Fall and Joy Division. Which you can find in... Rip It Up and Start Again. But below I do include a snippet from Rip It Up's prologue - a quote that has been circulating a fair bit in the last few days.

in some ways, on some days, my favorite Fall record

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Fall

Live At The Witch Trials

Step Forward

eMusic, 2004

by Simon Reynolds

In one early song, The Fall’s frontman Mark E. Smith exalted “the three R’s--repetition repetition repetition” The Manchester postpunk band got their schooling in trance-inducing monotony from The Velvet Underground and Can. On Witch Trials, their 1979 debut album, you can hear Television too, in Martin Bramah’s spidery, needling guitar lines, while Yvonne Pawlett’s glue-on-fingers keyboards make you flash on punkadelic Sixties garage bands like The Seeds. Now and then, on slower songs like “Two Steps Back”, there’s also a sense of disorientation and strangeness that recalls the early Doors. For Smith, seeing the world through askew eyes wasn’t an affliction, though, but a reprieve from the crushing mundanity of life in a Northern English factory town, evoked here on “Industrial Estate”--an uproarious rant about an area of Manchester zoned for heavy industry, where the ground-down workers numb themselves with Valium.

To escape this living death, Smith and company turned to their own chemical remedies.

“Underground Medecin” is a paean to amphetamine: “I found a reason not to die...” rejoices Smith, “The spark inside”. “Frightened,” conversely, evokes the downside of drugs: in this case, the racing thoughts, sleepless sweats and twitchy paranoia caused by snorting one white line too many. Smith’s rapid-fire snarl and see-through-you sneer have all the hallmarks of the “speed rap”.

That’s probably what he’s referring to in the song title “Crap Rap 2” (although some have actually argued that Smith’s unique style of half-spoken delivery is an authentic English equivalent to rapping!). In that song, Smith famously defined The Fall as “the white crap that talks back”--proles who refused to buckle down and accept their allotted fate in the British class system. It’s a mission statement that pungently distils both the group’s spirit of insolent defiance and the crudely-hewn but indomitable force of their music.

THE FALLBend SinisterMelody Maker, October 4th 1986

by Simon Reynolds

The Fall have not stopped being
The Fall. It's all here, on this their 26th long playing record: the wizened
sneer, the unforgiving beat, the haggard guitar. The Fall roll on.

A vast body of work, around
which a million words have been spilt, and still I don't feel nearer a notion
of what they're about. The Fall don't represent or propose anything. They
cannot be recruited to any scheme, clarified or filed away. They are this stubborn thing.

What spikes the lumbering wrath
of The Fall is the vehemence of Mark E. Smith's invective. But these days even
his targets remain shrouded and unclear. While The Fall's music has grown
steadily more vivacious and approachable, Smith's writing has folded in on
itself in an ever denser scrawl, beyond deciphering, let alone understanding.
Sometimes the obscure object of his derision is recognisable as ... people
like me, and then I'm suitably, pleasurably, chastened. The Fall,
on leash, as periodic flagellation: "Who makes the Nazis? Intellectual
halfwits." Ouch. I needed that. Perhaps that was the only
thing I ever learned from Mark E. Smith.

The Fall are an example of the
extent to which indie music has become a kind of commentary on pop - a system
which purports to represent us, but in fact excludes most of our experience.
Indie-pop is a kind of parallel system, unacknowledged by POP, but bound in
reaction. Like, say The Smiths, The Fall write about all the matter - squalor,
maladjustment, antagonism - written out of pop's script. If Mark E. Smith
represents anything it is bloody-mindedness, a recalcitrance towards those who
would improve us out of our bad habits and prejudices.

They've been a bad influence.
Groups like The Membranes and Age Of Chance think that anyone with
"attitude" can get up and do it. The upshot of this is a kind of
bolshiness without manifesto, an aimless spite: musically, a narrow
interpretation of The Fall - beauty is a lie. These groups consist of nothing but anti-pop
gesture. The Fall are un-pop too - anti-dance, anti-spectacle, un-sensual - but
they have carved out a rival territory of alien beauty that they can exploit
indefinitely. If the broad sweep of this music has been established, there's
still endless scope for growth through internal complication.

Bend Sinister, their thirty-third album, shows that the
Fall have a long way to go before they're exhausted. You've probably heard
their version of "Mr Pharmacist", with Mark's great slovenly
delivery, like his mouth was half-full of mushy peas. There are other
indications that The Fall have been steeping themselves in Sixties garage music
of late. Tracks like "Gross Chapel" sound as though The Fall have
taken the wiry truculence of garage punk and bloated it into a juggernaut
sprawl. "Shoulder Pads" is driven along by an absurdly jaunty
keyboard riff that makes me think of Question Mark And The Mysterians.

As it becomes less and less
clear what Mark E. Smith is on about, so The Fall's noise has come to seem more
and more unearthly. When I listen I don't think of grime and rubble and
delapidation, like I used to. I don't think of much at all. It's a noise to
lose yourself in, something that clouds the mind, roughs you up a bit and
leaves you a little deranged.

THE FALL

New Statesman monthly 'Pop' column, April 1st 1988

by Simon Reynolds

The Fall

Seminal Live

Melody Maker. 1989

by Simon Reynolds

THE FALL

New York Times, 11 July 1993

by Simon Reynolds

The Fall are one of England’s enduring cult bands. Formed in 1976 by the singer and lyricist Mark E. Smith, it evolved into one of the most critically acclaimed and influential groups of the post-punk era. In the mid-80's, the Fall was the prototype for the abrasive British genre of ‘shambling bands’. More recently, its coruscating sound and cryptic lyrics have been a major influence on the indie scene in the United States. Pavement, the most prominent band in the burgeoning American lo-fi underground, is indebted to the Fall, as are other up-and-coming groups like Truman's Water, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and God Is My Co-Pilot.

The Fall has signed with the hip independent label Matador, and the band's new album is its first for some while to be widely distributed in the United States. The Infotainment Scan (Matador/Atlantic 92263; all three formats), the Fall's 16th studio album, is one of the group's most accessible, so it may be that the band will reach a whole new audience, primed by Pavement, et al.

In its early days, the Fall was infamous for being listener-unfriendly. The second album, Dragnet, plumbed new depths of bargain-basement recording. On subsequent landmark albums like Grotesque (After the Gramme), Slates and Hex Enduction Hour, the Fall wove a dense, forbidding but – for those who persevered – captivating trance rock. Over implacable rockabilly rhythms, the band layered a thick wall of droning, distorted guitars in the tradition of minimalists like the Velvet Underground and the German band Can.

The Fall also experimented with techniques that involved degrading the guitar textures and distorting the human voice; one of Mr. Smith's favorite tricks was to feed his voice through a megaphone. He dubbed the band's style "country-and-northern," making a link between the raw primitivism of the Fall's sound and the surly attitude that's often attributed to the natives of Manchester, his hometown in the north of England.

Lyrically, he offered a bilious, withering dissection of British society. But instead of sloganeering, his songs immersed the listener in the grimy textures of working-class life. A self-educated avant-gardist from the wrong side of the tracks, Mr. Smith devised a distinctive fractured style that recalls the cut-up prose of William Burroughs.

As the 80's progressed, the Fall veered closer to pop with albums like The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall and This Nation's Saving Grace and even scored a number of chart hits. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith became a reliably controversial interviewee for the music press. His persona remains that of the classic British misanthrope, who scorns humbug and political cant whether it comes from the left or right. Mr. Smith's intransigence is best exemplified by his fervent belief in a man's right to kill himself smoking.

Musically, The Infotainment Scan may be one of the Fall's more approachable records, but Mr. Smith's lyrics are as caustic as ever, while his wizened sneer of a voice will always be jarring. Not for the first time, he aims his ire at what he regards as fatuous or regressive tendencies in pop culture. ‘Glam-Racket No.3’ takes a potshot at the current British youth trend of 70's revivalism. Over a fuzz-drenched riff and a stomping beat that's pure homage to glitter rock circa 1972, Mr. Smith decries nostalgia and makes a pointed jibe at the nouveau glam-rock band Suede, which is hugely popular in Britain.

The Fall's version of the Sister Sledge disco classic ‘Lost in Music’ may also conceal a pop-culture critique. The song was always an ambivalent commentary on dance culture's escapism (as well as the life of the professional musician), and Mr. Smith is probably using it to deride the British rave scene, which – like disco – is "caught in a trap" of druggy hedonism and mass amnesia. Paradoxically, the Fall's version retains much of the shimmering fleetness that made the original so enchanting.

The album's second side sees the Fall continue the flirtation with rave rhythms and the squelchy synthesizer textures of techno that it has indulged in on recent albums. Contemporary trance-dance has an obvious fit with Mr. Smith's early creed; "repetition in the music, and we're never gonna lose it." The song ‘Service’ layers an eerie mesh of vocal harmonies over a limber, shuffling funk groove. ‘The League of Bald-Headed Men’ seems to be a diatribe against gerontocracy, although it's hard to decipher whether its target is the decrepit fogies who rule Britain or the baby-boomer superstars who dominate international pop.

‘A Past Gone Mad’ is an anti-nostalgia rant layered over state-of-art techno squiggles and a hyped-up hip-hop beat, as it to proclaim that the Fall isn't afraid to move with the times. The band never has been, but the secret of its continued relevance is that the Fall never bends with the times. Mr. Smith and his band absorb whatever in the cultural climate is worth bothering with (what's not, he invariably scorns in song or interview) and make it swing to a rollicking, remorseless beat. Here's to the next 17 years of the Fall.

from the prologue to Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 (2005) in a section where I'm discussing postpunk as a era of unprecedented innovation in terms of vocal delivery and lyrical style

The Fall's Mark E. Smith invented “a kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny, voiced through a unique, one-note delivery somewhere between amphetamine-spiked rant and alcohol-addled yarn.”

from the aptly titled Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews, a portion of the interview concerning the early Fall, with original member Martin Bramah

"... That’s what drew those
elements of what became the Fall together--a common interest in obscure music.
I remember when I first met Mark Smith, he was listening to the Doors. I had thought
initially the Doors were a band like Bread--some American soft rock band!

Did you immediately become friends with Mark?

He was always Mark, always
as he is perceived now--even before he created the persona. Naturally a strange person to try to get know.
I knew his sisters before I knew him. Aged 16, I was around at his house
visiting his sisters and I was interested in the music that was coming out of
the front room. He was sitting there with his girlfriend Una who ended up
playing keyboards for us. He’s the kind of guy you skirt around initially. Very
wary of people and quite aggressive, but obviously quite eccentric as well. He
was this kid who wore a black leather jacket with a Nazi swastika arm
band--before punk rock! He’d walk around Prestiwch like that--more to make a
statement than anything. It was just perversity. He wasn’t a fascist or
anything.

Weren’t members of the Fall actually communists, at
one point?

We weren’t a political band
in any way that made rational sense. We were just kicking against the system
that was imposed upon us. If Mark wanted to piss people off he’d be a Nazi. It
was a heavy Jewish area, Prestwich. Lots of wealthy Jews there… But Tony Friel,
the bassist, was a member of the Communist Party. And there was that socialist
ethic.

But Mark Smith himself was never CP?

Not as such. He’s not one
for joining clubs. He’s contrary by nature. He’s always bucking the trend—he’s
like, ‘you think you’ve got an answer but it’s not necessarily so. You’re
kidding yourself, wake up and check out this angle’. His natural impulse is to
upset you and disturb you, which is what I liked most about him—but it does
make him hard to work with!

The Fall had that song, “Hey Fascist”, right? Not a
fraternal greeting, but a put-down!

It was originally called ‘Hey
Student’! Mark hated all the students in Manchester. At that point we had the biggest student population in
Europe . But then when we did Rock Against Racism Mark changed the lyrics to “Hey
Fascist” because he thought it might go down better that way.

Was Mark’s objection to students that they were square
and middlebrow in their music taste?

Because he didn’t go to
university, I suppose it’s the inverted snobbery of the working class kid sneering
at the privilege of students. It’s just teenage kids thinking it would be funny
to make a statement. It seemed irreverent.

You mentioned Tony Friel,
the Fall's original bassist… How did you come across him?

We went to the same secondary
school. I met him when I was 12 and I was attracted to because he was this
eccentric kid who got picked on a lot, but he had this wild imagination. He’d
always be in the corner of the playground telling these wild stories and
scribbling in notebooks. A crowd of people would gather to listen to his mad
flights of fancy.

So you were this gang of friends into weird music, and
then you became The Fall?

We were already writing
together before we discovered Sex Pistols. We had a musical empathy. Felt we
had an insight into music. And were obviously pickled in all kinds of drugs.
Taking a lot of LSD and magic mushrooms and really exploring music. We’d be in Mark’s attic, reading poetry and making
noise on instruments We were all non-musicians. But we didn’t have a drummer
and at the time it was impossible to conceive of doing gigs locally. What the Sex
Pistols did was make us realize we could do it. Up until the Pistols, all the
bands that played gigs came from out of town. They’d play at the Free Trade
Hall or the Apollo. We’d turn up and sneak in the back door or sometimes pay
for a ticket. But when the Pistols played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall we
thought, 'we’re as good as that'. So we immediately advertised for a drummer and
threw a set together. I met Pete Shelley at this club called the Ranch Bar and
told him we had a band, and he and Howard Devoto and Richard Boon, their
manager, came to see our first gig at Northwest Arts. So the next gig was
supporting the Buzzcocks.

Up in Mark’s attic, you were reading poetry?

We thought
we were beatniks. We liked to dress in black, and we loved the Velvets. We
loved the idea of Beat poets. Reading Burroughs and French existentialists, Aleister
Crowley and WB Yeats. We were writing poetry because we weren’t writing music
to start with. We all wrote words then. Bursting with talent, we were!

And you were already
exploring psychedelics?

That was the culture in the
clubs in mid-Seventies Manchester. The
60s hippies happened and by the 70s, it was a way of life. There were a lot of
casualties around but we were the next generation of kids. We saw all the
hippies who’d blown their brains out and we felt we were wiser than that, but
we were attracted to the experience. We learned from the kids who were older
than us, people like John Cooper Clark. He was 10 years older and from that 60s
generation When we discovered him living down the road from us in Prestwich, we
started hanging out together.

The Fall’s name comes from Camus, so despite being
anti-student, you were far from anti-intellectual.

Not at all. We thought all
your originality was knocked out of you at University. We were keen to learn
what was interesting but we didn’t want to be force-fed. We’d all rejected what
little education we had. I played truant whenever I could. But I was being
primed to be factory fodder. We were fired up and keen to find out things for
ourselves.

Initially we originally
called The Outsiders, also from Camus, but then we realized there were three
other bands called that. So we chose the Fall. It was Tony Friel’s influence,
he was reading Camus. Mark’s idea for a name was Master Race and the Death's
Heads. If he had got his way, history might have been very different!

Didn’t the name The Fall also embody a kind of concept
or attitude? It has evocations of decline, the decadent phase of a
civilization, but also the intimation of comeuppance--the mighty being toppled.
The schadenfreude of watching the powerful being brought down.

It’s hard to define the
concept of the Fall. We were trying to get to the bottom of things and express
what was really bugging us. Mark was the one with the real vision, and that
vision quickly became the Fall, but initially it was a real melting pot. It was
like a poetry group at first. We used to share our innermost feelings in words
and play our favorite albums. Mark bought a guitar but couldn’t play it. I was already singing in another band so the
first line up of the Fall was me singing and Mark playing guitar. It quickly
switched because Mark was writing these mad, well-observed lyrics. Our early stuff sounded American but Mark
picked up on how to make Manchester interesting.

In Manchester music generally there's long been that
Northern patriotism thing--down with the effete, wanky South. Especially London.

It was more about expressing
ourselves and getting the uniqueness across. We loved what was happening in New
York. For me as a guitarist, Tom Verlaine was a big influence. And we loved the
stuff in London too. But we didn’t want to imitate it. Mark managed to embody
our angle on what was relevant. Some bands stumbled when they tried to politicise
punk, but Mark saw that was silly and limited. We tried to leave that behind
and explore the music from before punk that was more diverse. We listened to a
lot of dub reggae and a lot of German music.

As a guitarist, did you have any particular ploys?

I was a self-taught player. Tony
Friel was a better musician than me so he gave me some of the rudiments--how to
make a bar chord. I was into discord, getting away from the regimented and the
sterile. We were inspired. We knew instinctively that we could do it, and we
wanted to do something different and make a primal statement.

So the first actual released thing by the Fall was on
the Live at the Electric Circus
compilation, and then there was quite a delay before the first EP, Bingo Masters Break Out! got released on Step Forward. How did you
hook up with that label?

We’d already recorded that
first EP by the time of Electric Circus,
but it didn’t get released for a year. I’m a bit vague about the Step Forward
connection. Mark was managing the Fall along with Kay Carroll, his girlfriend.
It was s London-based label and owned by Miles Copeland. By then I was kind of
just the guitarist in the band. I just turned up and played.

So was that why you ultimately became frustrated and
left? Mark taking over and The Fall becoming his band?

The Fall had been together
for two or years, but it was a very intense period. We’d done a lot of work and
received a lot of attention from the media. It was becoming very much Mark’s
thing. I was sick of the way we were being treated as a band. What was
initially a collective became a dictatorship. I felt full of confidence and
ideas and was keen to do exactly what I wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong, I
think Mark’s a genius but he was making it very hard for me to work with him.
Mark’s not a musician so he couldn’t literally tell me what to play. He could
only tell me what he didn’t like. But he had a vision of how he wanted it. But
it wasn’t so much about the music, it was more how we were being treated as
people on a daily basis.

And your last contribution to The Fall was writing
three tracks on the second album, Dragnet?

I wrote three of the songs
that went on Dragnet but I didn’t
play on it. I left after Live At the Witch
Trials.

And by that point, all the original members had left,
apart from you and Mark?

We all left for our own
reasons, and at different times, but when you look at it now there wasn’t much
of a time lag between. Una Baines left about a year before me. Karl Burns, the
drummer, left somewhere in between. Tony Friel was the first to go. Tony left
when Kay became the manager
because he thought it was a bad idea. He felt he’d invested a lot in the Fall.
He’d come up with the name and he was the musician in the band and in his view
he was teaching us how to play the bloody instruments. He left because his
freedom was infringed. And he went off to form the Passage with Dick Witts.

You know what, I think it was
initially me that suggested Kay manage us. She was a friend of Una’s and she
was hanging out with us, and she seemed level-headed. She was a bit older than
us. At the same time, Mark was starting to go out with her. It became a bit of a Yoko and John Lennon
scenario. The girlfriend affirming his genius. Mark needed that encouragement,
so I’m not saying it was all bad. But it’s the typical girlfriend interfering
in the band scenario. But we didn’t all gang up and leave. At the time we all
thought it was for individual reasons.

So was it tough for Una, having gone out with Mark,
and now he’s dating her friend, and the friend is managing the band?

It was Una’s decision they
broke up. Mark was more hurt by that. When I first met them Mark and Una were a
real item—first love, teenage true love. They were an inseparable item. Then we
formed the Fall and Una started seeing other people. She was off everywhere
doing things and she kind of left the Fall thinking it wasn’t an important
thing.....

You and Una then formed the Blue Orchids - did you see the group as the vanguard of a new psychedelia, music for "heads"?

You can’t play down the
influence of drugs on Blue Orchids and The Fall. The first drugs we got into
was strong LSD. Pot smoking seemed lame back then--hippie guys who sat around stoned and did
nothing. We were anti drugs at first and thought we could reach the psychedelic
thing without the drugs. But in a club someone gave us some microdots, when we
were about 16. The next day we went to Heaton Park and dropped it and spent the
whole day on LSD. Heaton Park is a stately home, the nearest thing to a common
in Manchester. And then we discovered psylocibin mushroom were growing in
Heaton Park for free.Someone told us
that there were fields of these
mushrooms. So from that point we were kind of pickled in magic mushrooms and LSD. We just made it our own. It was
a free source of entertainment. We’d be munching these things and sitting in
pubs and seeing the world in a strange way and getting ideas for songs about
our local environment. The Fall was like Coronation
Street on acid.

Further Reading

The best things I've read on The Fall are still Barney Hoskyns's revelatory interview-essay and live review for New Musical Express in 1981, here preserved at subscription-only Rock's Back Pages. A non pay-walled version of the interview can be seen here.

Mark Fisher at his sharpest in this klassik K-punk seriesofpiecesMemorex for the Krakens: The Fall's Pulp Modernism. Also an unfinished talk written by Mark to be delivered at a Fall conference in Salford in 2008, but never delivered owing to family bereavement.

Is "Mark'll Sink Us" actually about Mark Sinker or is that my addled music-press-obsessive brain thinking daft? Here's a piece by MS on The Fall (and the Smiths) and Englishness from NME in 1988 and another fromThe Wire in 1986 on The Fall and the horror / hallucinogens interface.

A vivid feature on The Fall in Iceland circa making of Hex Enduction Hour by Melody Maker's Colin Irwin

Not properly scanned the obituaries and tributes as yet but here'sGeeta Dayal's for NPR and a tribute from Sasha Frere-Jones for Village Voice.And here's a lovely tribute / memory-session from Jon Wilde (formerly Jonh Wilde, of Melody Maker renown) who interviewed Mark E. Smith no less than eight times, at We Are Cult website.